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Is Coming Out Gay Just Another Comic Book Stunt?

27 May

Astonishing Gay X-Men?

To be a man in your fifth decade and still reading comics is slightly embarrassing and that was reinforced when sitting next to my 13-year-old nephew at The Avengers and realizing I’ve forgotten more about every major character in the movie than he will ever know (or care) about.

I gave up comics this year.  I didn’t give up buying them every so often.  Old habits do die-hard.  I just took myself out of the never-ending cycle of 52 Wednesdays a year burning up gas and spending money to bring home another $20 to $40 worth of four-color funny books that after being read once or twice end up in filling storage bins in my basement.    Throw in the ridiculous cost ($3.99 for something that used to cost 12 cents) and giving comics up wasn’t a tough call.

I still read comic books.  Most of them are my brother’s “New 52″ line from DC Comics.   Last year, fueled by desperation as much as inspiration, DC zeroed out its existing universe and rebooted their line with  brand new Number One issues, new costumes for Superman and his other super-friends and in doing so generated a buzz that garnered a ton of favorable coverage from the mainstream media and the interest and excitement of fans.

That’s how you create a buzz about comics.  You come up with a stunt.  Kill Superman and bring him back.  Kill Captain America and bring him back.  Kill Batman and…are you starting to see a pattern here?

Anyway,  The New 52 worked great.   DC knocked industry leader Marvel on its backside and out of the top spot, which for as minimal comic books have on pop culture is like being the tallest pygmy.   Movies based on comic books are big business.  Comic books themselves struggle to sell 75,000 copies a month, but DC is owned by TimeWarner and Marvel by Disney and they could give a shit if Superman sells in the thousands or in the dozens.  What their comic book companies contribute to ledger sheets of  their corporate masters wouldn’t pay for a week’s worth of office supplies.

What Disney and TimeWarner care about are the comic book properties.  You think they give a toot in a tornado about a damn comic book when one Friday evening of The Avengers puts more cash in The Mouse House’s pocket than 40 years Avengers comic books.

“Dick, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?”

The New 52 was a great hook, but it wasn’t a revolutionary concept.  Many of the same artists and writers whose lousy stories ran the company into a ditch were now being tapped to pull it out.  Zeroing out their universe and starting from scratch liberated DC from decades of confusing and convoluted comic continuity .   Continuity is important to the educated in comics lore fan base, but their numbers are too small and the demographic too old for Hollywood to give a shit if a geek gets upset because Superman no longer wears his underwear on the outside.  The purpose of comic books are to provide concepts that can be mined by movie studios and turned into movie franchises. DC has failed to successfully follow Marvel in making the transition from comic book company to feeder system for million-dollar movies.

It no longer matters what happens in comics.  Not that it really ever did, but particularly not now.  Spider-Man, Batman and Iron Man generate millions in ticket sales and that second life on the silver screen means whatever happens to them in their paper and staples form don’t mean a thing.

What’s left for comic books?  Stunts.  Tricks.  Big cataclysmic events that shake up the status quo, shatter worlds, and change everything as we know.  Then six months later someone comes along and changes it all back.

The newest stunt:  Make someone gay everyone thought was straight or take a second or third-string hero and marry him off.   To his boyfriend.   HEY KIDS! GAY COMICS!

Marvel is allowing Northstar, their French-Canadian mutant speedster to marry his Black boyfriend.  Gay and interracial marriage?  Two taboos broken for the price of one.

DC’s response?  Follow the leader and announce a “major” character will come out the closet as a gay man.

Gay supporting characters and even gay heroes aren’t new.  Northstar has been out for years.  DC’s Wildstorm imprint featured a openly gay couple named Apollo and The Midnighter who were overt Superman/Batman stand-ins.   But their love affair ended when they were incorporated into the DC mainstream.  Odd that there weren’t many protests from the continuity-obsessed fans about that reboot.

Not Superman and Batman, but just like them.

Who will come out of the comic book closet?  It could be Batman.  It should be Batman.  But because it’s both so obvious and so perfect it won’t be Batman.  Batman is now on his third or fourth Robin.  He just keeps picking up young boys to be his “partner.”  What would you call a billionaire who’s never married, only uses women as props, enjoys dressing up head to toe in leather and prefers the company of athletic youths?

One of Bats current writers, Grant Morrison, fessed up in Playboy  the Dark Knight”s antenna isn’t picking up the wavelength of the opposite sex.

“He’s very plutonian in the sense that he’s wealthy and also in the sense that he’s sexually deviant,” Morrison said. “Gayness is built into Batman. I’m not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There’s just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he’s intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay.”

“I think that’s why people like it. All these women fancy him and they all wear fetish clothes and jump around rooftops to get to him. He doesn’t care — he’s more interested in hanging out with the old guy and the kid.”

As someone with no skin in the game, I’m all for gay fans of comics being represented with gay characters they can relate to   An openly homosexual hero isn’t going to corrupt a kid’s mind anymore than most of the other crap DC and Marvel poop out every Wednesday.

Just don’t stop there.  Let’s see what happens when a gay superhero faces discrimination from a straight superhero who doesn’t want to team up with him.  Instead of fighting alien invaders, let’s have the Justice League or Avengers take on a homophobic hate group.

There have always been gay themes in comics as long as there have been comics.  It was just nodded and winked at and never spoken of in a serious way.   This feels like the latest in a long line of contrived stunts the major companies engage in passing it off as being socially conscious.   We’ll see if DC and Marvel are as seriously committed to their “evolution” as gay couples are to getting married.

Don’t look for the happy couple in the next X-Men movie.

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Posted by on May 27, 2012 in Music. Movies. Media. More., News & Views

 

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Shaken and Stirred by the “Skyfall” Teaser

24 May

007 has a license to kill, but did he lose his razor?

A teaser trailer is supposed to do precisely two things:  generate a bit of a buzz before the movie opens and not send off major warning signs that it’s going to suck (Green Lantern, I’m  looking at you).    The teaser for James Bond 23 , Skyfall does its job with workmanlike precision in a tidy 94 seconds.

A lot of quick cuts and ominous music does not a good movie make,  But a new James Bond movie is always something to look forward to.  Nobody is more pleased by than I am that Skyfall doesn’t give off the tell-tale odor of flop sweat.

Casino Royale was a return to glory for the franchise, but the follow-up Quantum of Solace killed a lot of the good will.   In the theater it’s busy and gets to point “A” to “B” faster than its predecessor, but Quantum of Solace  doesn’t go anywhere special.  Even though the story picks up immediately after Casino Royale all it establishes is this is a Bond who really seems to enjoy killing people.   Daniel Craig is once again the most joyless and cold-blooded 007 ever, but he’s got nothing to work with in Quantum.   The plot was murky, the bad guy  wimpy and bug-eyed and the standard “Bond girl “nearly non-existent with the whole tiresome mess anchored by Marc Forster’s sloppy and scattered direction.

Forster, who had never handled a big-budget franchise film tried copying the fight and chase scenes from the previous film and demonstrated he simply couldn’t shoot an action scene.  Either he shot everything too close, too dark and cut it so fast it’s hard at times to figure out what’s happening on screen.

Roger Moore, the third actor to portray Bond on film put it well.  ‘I enjoy Daniel Craig, I think he’s a damn good Bond but the film as a whole, there was a bit too much flash cutting for me.’

‘I thought Casino Royale was better. It was just like a commercial of the action. There didn’t seem to be any geography and you were wondering what the hell was going on.”

“She needs help! She watched ‘Quantum of Solace’ three times in a row.”

I’ve watched Quantum on DVD, but it still leaves no impression.  Things zip by on screen, lines are delivered, guns shoot, and Bond wins.  The end.  Roll credits and put the license to kill in a drawer for four years.

Skyfall  arrives in November both liberated and burdened.   Four years is a long time between Bond entries and it’s the longest lay-off between films since the six years from License to Kill (1989) to GoldenEye (1995) which featured a long legal battle and the recasting of the lead between Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan.  Skyfall doesn’t have to be as good as Casino Royale.  It  only has to be better than Quantum of So What.   How hard could that be.

Since the last time we saw Bond onscreen he was scowling his way through a pedestrian movie, there is pressure on Craig and Sam Mendes, the Academy Award director of American Beauty to regain the momentum.

One way to do it is to give everyone a reason to hope the five months from the teaser to the film fly by  Bond’s longest line of dialogue goes a long way to get me there.

“Some men are coming to kill us. We’re gonna kill them first.”

That sounds like the bad-tempered Bond we’ve come to known and love.

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Posted by on May 24, 2012 in Music. Movies. Media. More.

 

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“I’ll Persuade You” and The Black Widow Does.

20 May

“Is it hot in here or is it just all this leather I’m wearing?”

When you make a movie that grosses over a billion dollars and shatters box office records like The Avengers, every little detail of it is going to be picked apart, analyzed, and dissected down to its essence trying to figure out how it became such a category crossing sensation that defies demographics and appeals to teenagers, couples, families, fanboys of all ages, races, shapes and sizes.

It’s a major plus to hire a director who likes his women characters and treats them as important components instead of pretty girls in tight spandex.

The Black Widow can’t fly, doesn’t wear a suit of high-tech armor, doesn’t sport a mystical hammer, unbreakable shield, or get big mean and green, but that doesn’t mean she has no game. Of all the incredible things Joss Whedon put into The Avengers he gave a second-string super heroine major game.

Black Widow 2.0 is a vast improvement over her uselessness in Iron Man 2 she almost seems like a brand new character despite being played by the same actress. In the trailers, the Widow and Hawkeye looked like they were there to fetch coffee for Cap and Iron Man. Whedon was crafty to not give away what he had planned for Natasha Romanoff. . More screen time than Thor, Bruce Banner or Hawkeye and third behind Captain America and Iron Man.

Just don’t believe Scarlett Johansson got the role of Black Widow based upon her immense acting abilities as opposed to how hot she looks in a completely impractical outfit so tight if she you can tell if a coin in her pocket is heads or tails.  There’s plenty of beefcake in The Avengers. Let’s not pretend the Black Widow’s primary power isn’t eye candy, but to Johansson, Whedon and co-screenwriter Zak Penn’s infinite credit, they made Natasha Romanoff so much more than that.

Pretty people get cast as superheroes.  Even if they wear masks, they tend to lose them exposing the actor’s face.  If you’re an incredibly good-looking dude like Chris Evans or Chris Hemsworth, that’s  understandable.  Lucky for Johansson she’s both pretty and plays a character that doesn’t hide her looks behind a mask. Looking pretty and occasionally punching out someone was all she was given to do in Iron Man 2. 

It sure helps to work with a director who likes female characters.

So I wasn’t excited to see the Black Widow was an Avenger until I saw The Avengers.  Whedon is justifiably being lavished with praise for doing the following:

  • Fixing the problem of two previous attempts to present the Hulk as something more than a CGI hot mess.
  • Made a superhero movie fun instead of dark, grim and gritty without making it dumb.
  • Turned a supporting character who was previously little more than sexy wallpaper into a valuable member of a group instead one of their weakest links.  And she’s still sexy.
  • Doubled the expectations that The Dark Knight Rises can’t get away with just being good; now it has to be great.

Sexism has been a part of the comics as long as there have been women in comics. All you have to do is look at how often Wonder Woman is depicted bound and chained. Despite DC’s “New 52″ revamp, while Superman got out of his “undies on the outside” look, they put Wonder Woman back in her one-piece bathing suit. The more things change….

That’s why the Black Widow runs around in curve-hugging black leather that is all but useless in a fight, but  looks cool.  Whedon likes to give his actresses interesting things to do and say, but he has to pander to popular tastes too and guys really like women kicking ass in tight clothes.   As least she’s not wearing heels.

One of the last frontiers for the super hero genre is to make a successful one featuring a super heroine.  Wonder Woman seems like a no-brainer, but DC Comics has been inept at making movies featuring characters not named Superman and Batman.  Hollywood is reluctant to put millions into a movie featuring women or minorities as the center of attraction.

The speculation Marvel will greenlight a solo Black Widow film is running rampant on the Internet, but like most things online, doubt everything until the ticket stub is in your hand.  It could happen and it should happen, but whether it does happen is no sure thing.

I’m taking my nephew to see the movie tomorrow.  He won’t care if the Black Widow is a strong hero or an objectified sex object. . All he’ll care about is how much butt she kicks.  He might also take a long look at how her butt looks.

Yeah, you think it’s easy kicking butt in skin-tight leather? Try it sometime.

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Posted by on May 20, 2012 in Music. Movies. Media. More.

 

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Donna Summer: She Worked Hard For the Money

18 May

She worked hard for it honey.

“Sometimes it gets to the point where you’ve been pushed for so long, by this monstrous, monstrous force, this whole production of people and props that you’re responsible for, by audiences and everything that rules you, until you take it upon yourself to be a machine. And at some point a machine breaks down.”

~ Donna Summer

My enduring memory of Donna Summer, the most popular artist of the disco era who passed away at age 63 from cancer is when I wore a younger man clothes I danced with a girl I did not like to “Love To Love You, Baby.”  All 17 minutes and 18 seconds of it.

Summer was the undisputed Queen of Disco (Sorry, Gloria Gaynor), but the downside of being the ruler of a genre of music that is as despised as much as it is admired is once disco fell off (and it fell off hard) her career was pulled down along with it.  A 1978 Rolling Stone cover story about Summer posed the question, “Is There Life After Disco?”  The answer was of course .   There just aren’t a lot more hits in the pipeline.

It isn’t that Summer was a talentless mouthpiece for the lush production of strings, horns, and  Giorgio Moroder’s synthesized beats.  She was the peanut butter to the jelly of her European producers’ coldly efficient and relatively anonymous music.

The highs and lows of Donna Summer are documented perfectly in the 2005 best of compilation, Gold.   Disco was great to dance to but man, is it ever lousy to listen to.  It’s the perfect triumph of machine over man and nobody was better at cooing seductively over bloodless, passionless, and robotic sounds than Summer.   More than any other style, disco music is frozen in time and like white linen suits and feathered hair it hasn’t aged well.

“I Feel Love” may deserve the credit for the template for what electronic dance music has been for the past 25 years, but you can’t make love to it.   Immediately after listening to disco,  I always have to follow it up with some Led Zeppelin or Funkadelic, or anything else that sounds like human beings were involved in making it.

Take your order, sir?

At 34 songs spread over two discs, Gold is overly generous by half, but if you’re interested in marking where Summer’s career ran off a cliff, it’s the phony attempt at “new wave” relevance with “The Wanderer” which is bad, but “Love Is In Control (Finger On the Trigger)” is one overproduced hot mess of a song with Quincy Jones throwing everything in his trick bag at it as he tries and fails to kick-start Summer’s faltering fortunes.   Summer herself wasn’t fond of the six months she spent recording with the man behind Michael Jackson’s biggest solo hits.  She told a reporter, “Sometimes I feel it’s a Quincy Jones album that I sang on.”

Like many other artists whose success hinged on being the best at a specific genre at its commercial peak, Summer struggled to stay relevant in her post-disco diva days.   She changed record labels, worked with various producers, dabbled with various sounds and there are a smattering of moments of interest as she sticks a toe in pop, funk, new wave and non-disco dance music, but the supreme moment of accomplishment remains “She Works Hard For the Money.”

She works hard for the money. So hard for it, honey.
She works hard for the money. So you better treat her right.

Onetta here in the corner stand and wonders where she is.
And it’s strange to her, some people seem to have everything.
9 am on the hour hand and she’s waiting for the bell.
And she’s looking real pretty. She’s waiting for her clientele.

She works hard for the money. So hard for it, honey.
She works hard for the money. So you better treat her right.

After being forced by David Geffen to abandon Moroder and her European production team and shelving, I’m A Rainbow, another two-record set and the ill-matched Jones produced Donna Summer, Summer was compelled to deliver one more album to her former label, Casablanca.  The result was the inspired She Works Hard For the Money.  Paired with producer Michael Omartin, Summer wrote or co-wrote every song including the Number One R&B title track.

The album is spotty, but “She Works Hard For the Money” is historic as its accompanying video was the first by a Black woman put on “heavy rotation” on MTV back in ancient times when the “M” in MTV stood for music.   Summer (despite being a disco queen couldn’t dance a lick) stands around in the video observing its female protagonist indeed working hard for the money.  Though Summer the based the song on an exhausted Black woman working as a bathroom attendant she observed, the video featured a White woman named “Onetta.”  Go figure.

The other odd thing about Donna Summer besides her inability to dance is when I would d.j. parties, if I played one of her songs they would clear the floor.   Nobody would dance to them.  That overproduced Eurodisco sound worked okay in a club, but fell flat on its ass at a house party.

Donna Summer never found a second act as successful as her disco days, but she made her mark, had some hits and left a lasting impression upon music.  That’s not too shabby a list of accomplishments to be proud of.   R.I.P., Queen of Disco.

My Donna Summer Top Ten playlist:

1.  She Works Hard For the Money
2.  Hot Stuff
3.  Bad Girls
4.  Dim All the Lights
5.  Sunset People
6.   Last Dance
7.   This Time I Know It’s For Real
8.   I Feel Love
9.   No More Tears (Enough is Enough)
10. Love to Love You Baby

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Posted by on May 18, 2012 in An Appreciation, Music. Movies. Media. More.

 

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Bob Baldwin: Betcha By Golly Wow – The Music of Thom Bell

09 May

New urban jazz keyboardist Bob Baldwin disdains the “smooth jazz” moniker, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he isn’t familiar with the conventions of the genre. He’s got ideas that don’t have a thing to do with cranking out infinite versions of the same old sound with a few new riffs. Baldwin is a bit more ambitious than that and with Betcha By Golly Wow: The Songs of Thom Bell he honors one of the most successful songwriters of 1970s soul music.

Though not intended as the successor to Baldwin’s last tribute recording, Never Can Say Goodbye: A Tribute to Michael Jackson (Trippin n’ Rhythm, 2010), the new album is tighter and more focused than last year’s Re-Vibe (Trippin n’ Rhythm, 2011) which meandered at over 70 minutes in length. Here Baldwin is working with superior material from Bell (and his collaborator, the late Linda Creed) and the results are reproductions that pay respectful homage to the originals even if they don’t quite match them.

Most of Bell’s biggest hits are included. “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time),” “Betcha By Golly Wow” and “People Make the World Go Round” became staples of soul music when The Delfonics and The Stylistics performed them and Baldwin’s interpretation augments his keyboards with contributions from guitarists Russ Freeman and saxophonists Gerald Albright, Marion Meadows and Paul Taylor, among other guest musicians and vocalists.

There are some curious choices in material as Baldwin bypasses Spinners smashes “I’ll Be Around” and “Could It Be I’m Falling In Love?” in favor of the corny “The Rubberband Man,” which is salvaged by Ragan Whiteside‘s flute and Paul Brown on guitar. Bell himself penned a new song, “Gonna Be Sweeter.”

“Break Up To Make Up” is the album’s centerpiece with Will Downing‘s vocals gliding over the scorching beauty of Albright’s alto sax and augmented by six background singers as Baldwin and the rock-solid rhythm section of drummer Buddy Williams and bassist Anthony Jackson keep everything in the pocket. Downing has lost a bit as he falters toward the end, but he’s still one of premier crooners working today. Vivian Green interpretation of “La La Means I Love You” is pretty impressive and she’s a vocalist deserving of wider recognition.

The creator of “New Urban Soul” chillin’.

If the album has a problem, it is that there is a certain coldness due the reliance upon electronic “bass and drums” instead of live musicians. It may be more efficient to employ synthesizers, but for anyone familiar with Thom Bell’s lush arrangements in his heyday, the change in instrumentation is noticeable and jarring.

Baldwin may have seized upon a blueprint to build his future recordings around. He can alternate between his original works, and tributes to other unsung songwriters whose success in crafting hits for others denied them some of the recognition they deserved. Potential possibilities could include the music of Gamble and Huff, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Maurice White, Prince or Stevie Wonder.

If he follows that career path and make albums as pleasingly solid as Betcha By Golly Wow: The Songs Of Thom Bell , Baldwin will be a very busy man for the next decade or so.

Tracks: Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time); The Rubberband Man; La La Means I Love You); Gonna Be Sweeter; Break Up To Make Up; You’re As Right As Rain; I’ll Be Around; Bell & Creed; Betcha By Golly Wow; People Make the World Go Round.

Personnel: Bob Baldwin: piano, bass, drums, percussion; keyboards, vocals, background vocals, horn arrangement; Russ Freeman: guitars (1); Ragan Whiteside: flute, vocals (1, 2, 6); Preston Glass: keyboards, loops, horns, clavinet, drums, vocals, additional keyboards (1-4, 6, 7); Dennis Johnson: drums (2), drum loop (4); Paul Brown: guitars (2); Vivian Green: lead vocals (3); Gemma Burns: background vocals (3); Will Downing: lead vocals (5); Gerald Albright: alto saxophone (5); Buddy Williams: drums (5); Anthony Jackson: bass (5); B.J. Nelson, Paulette McWilliams, Audrey Wheeler, Craig Derry, Curtis King, Vanesse Thomas: background vocals (5); Paul Taylor: soprano saxophone (6); Marion Meadows: soprano saxophone (7, 10); Tony Lewis: drums (8); Toni Redd: vocals (9); Bob Francheschini: saxophone (9); Onaje Allen Gumbs: arrangement (9); Chembo Cornell: percussion (10).

This review originally appeared at All About Jazz

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Posted by on May 9, 2012 in Music. Movies. Media. More.

 

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‘The Avengers’ Sticks the Landing

05 May

“Whoa. Look at all those piles of money!”

If The Avengers had been a failure no one would have been shocked.   Almost everything that happens on the screen has been seen time and again in other summer blockbusters, but this one goes somewhere no other has gone before.   It draws from no less than five previous films (Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America and The Incredible Hulk) and incorporates key elements from all of them while simultaneously  pulling off the unlikely feat of telling its own story so well-written and self-contained that it’s not necessary to have seen any of its predecessors.

The suits at Marvel Studios can exhale and pop the bubbly.   The Avengers sticks the landing and pulls together almost flawlessly what could have been a car crash of clunky continuity and an unmanageable mess of too many characters, back stories and exposition into a superhero film that doesn’t just raise the bar but kicks it into the stratosphere.

Watching what got us to this point was an experience where none of the movies (still haven’t popped The Incredible Hulk DVD in the player yet) were bad, some were pretty good, Iron Man 2 was mediocre and none of them were outstanding.    The Avengers is outstanding.    It’s entertaining and energetic after it gets past a slow opening 30 minutes as director Joss Whedon takes time to assemble his heroes and villains before all the avenging takes off in the second and third acts.

I avoided the crowd at a 11:00 am showing with my wife (who loves her some Robert Downey, Jr.) and my know-it-all 17-year-old daughter who loves Chris Evans face and Chris Hemsworth’s arms.   I would say Scarlett Johansson’s leather clad Black Widow and to a much lesser extent, the cameo of Gwyneth Paltrow ‘s narrow butt in shorts is supposed to thrill the fan boys, but they’re going to get their nerdgasms from the sight of The Hulk throwing down with Thor.

“Didn’t Hannibal Lecter start off like this?”

My expectations were not only met but exceeded by the two hours and 22 minutes we spent in the dark and my synapses have been doing a happy dance all day long.  The Avengers has dethroned Spider-Man 2 as the second-best superhero movie of all time and by a WIDE margin. It can’t touch the force of nature known as The Dark Knight, but The Dark Knight Rises will have to be killing it to beat this.

This movie is a bad-ass thrill ride.   It thinks big, it’s full of big set pieces, big fights, and yes, Virginia, even big laughs with lots of them coming from an extremely unlikely source.

What does a $200 million budget buy? Everything I think I could have dreamed of for The Avengers and then some. It’s eye-popping entertainment and yes, even Scarlett Johansson is given something to do besides be token eye-candy for the guys. Tom Hiddleston’s Loki is a great bad guy delivering his lines with Shakespehrian seriousness as he smiles like someone enjoying his own private joke.  He’s a great schemer even if his master plan doesn’t really hang together. The movie takes some time to get going but once it does, it works wonderfully until the last minute.

Captain America calls the shots in the comic book, but this isn’t a comic book and the real genius isn’t just in the impressive action scenes (and they are extremely impressive), but the interaction of a group of geniuses, soldiers, monsters, spies and gods trying to figure out how to set aside their significant differences to stave off a greater threat.   The bonding between Downey’s snarky Tony Stark and Mark Ruffalo’s surfer dude coolly contained scientist living a terrible double life works beautifully.   Chris Evans has the worst costume and the burden of trying to make these highly combustible personalities work together.   The Hulk and Thor are tough sells to pull off, but Captain America is the hero that holds it all together based upon his integrity and courage.

“Hulk want to renegotiate contract!”

Whedon knows how to balance out a diverse group of characters and do it such a way that nobody feels short-changed or disappears off-screen for extended periods of time. It’s a masterful bit of direction by him. He’s going to be able to write his own ticket after this one.

I can’t say much more about this movie but to say it’s much better than I could have hoped and I will be seeing it again. Oh, and after two movies where they couldn’t quite get the Hulk right, Whedon gets it right and then some. Hulk smash puny film up good!

This being a Marvel movie you must stay through the credits. There are two Easter eggs thrown in. One that only comic book geeks will get and another that is…kind of different.

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Posted by on May 5, 2012 in Music. Movies. Media. More.

 

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So Stupid Even A Rock n’ Roll Caveman Can Do It

18 Apr

First the hair goes. Then the hearing goes. Finally the brains goes.

A few months ago there was some minor surprise when Megadeth founder Dave Mustaine came out for Rick Santorum and doubted the president’s citizenship. What’s notable is this is the first time the only guy to get fired from Metallica for being a bigger drunk than the rest of the band put together had said anything newsworthy in years.

Rock n’ roll Republicans aren’t all that rare.   There’s Muscatel Mustaine, the late Johnny Ramone, Kid Rock, Britney Spears, Meatloaf, and Alice Cooper who are all out of the closet conservatives.  You can rock and be right-wing.  It’s just kind of weird.

Then there’s the case of The Motor City Madman, Ted Nugent who is in a class all by himself and that’s no class at all.

Speaking whatever gibberish comes out of his STD ravaged brain at last weekend’s NRA convention, Nugent continued ripping into the president, saying the Obama Administration was “wiping its ass with the Constitution” and then he went for the part that will earn him a visit from some non-prostitute patronizing Secret Service agents.

“If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will be either be dead or in jail by this time next year.”

“It isn’t the enemy that ruined America. It’s good people who bent over and let the enemy in. If the coyote’s in your living room pissing on your couch, it’s not the coyote’s fault. It’s your fault for not shooting him.”

Credit Nugent for his consistency in his hatred for the current White House occupant. In 2007, he raved at a concert, “Obama, he’s a piece of shit. I told him to suck on my machine gun.” He then turned his attention to Hillary Clinton saying, “Hey Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless bitch”.

Would you let this man date your teenage daughter?

I enjoyed Nugent’s music more than Nugent’s Neanderthal politics until he made himself such an insufferable prick and his politics completely took over his music.  He was on Piers Morgan’s shitty show last week babbling about the Trayvon Martin case and it was obvious he didn’t have clue One about it.. Why does anyone care what an old rock n’ roll fart has to say about politics?

Sure he could still shred with the best of them, but the Nuge was never as good as he thought he was and his “poontang, poontang, POONTANG” rap was played  out years ago.  This was before he got caught playing hide-the-salami with some sweet young meat that happened to be underage.  (Professional train wreck Courtney Love claims to have provided her oral affections to Ted when she was only 12, but you have to consider the source of that information). How did Terrible Ted solve his diddling jail bait dilemma?   Why, by getting having himself appointed the legal guardian of his girlfriend and then he could legally bone her to his depraved heart’s delight.

My daughter, who cares nothing about rock music, wandered through the living room one weekend when I was watching an old Behind the Music episode about Nugent.  She sat down and watched the whole thing and at the end she concluded, “He’s an asshole.”

Nugent is a flaming asshole.   He has also repeatedly threatened violence against the President of the United  States.  Let’s see how long it takes Mitt Romney to repudiate a serial pedophiles endorsement.   Why Republicans like to hang around with this chickenhawk (in every sense of the word), I have no idea.Maybe they’re hoping to pick up one of Ted’s stray little girls?

This is nothing new for Nugent.  Being loud, vulgar and a loudmouth was part of his schtick long before he started looking like a redneck trucker.   His obnoxiousness has grown as his record sales have slumped and put him back in the shit hole clubs and state fair circuit.

Is this Romney's idea of "family values?"

Let’s also see if the same folks who were demanding President Obama return Bill Maher’s campaign contribution because Maher is such a horrible sexist will get their undies in a wad over the author of “Bridge Over Troubled Daughters,”  “Pussywhipped”, “If You Can’t Lick ‘Em…Lick ‘Em” and the always charming, “My Baby Love My Butter On Her Gritz.”

Gene Simmons recently said he regretted his vote for Obama in 2008 and is backing Romney now.  Maybe this is a change for Ted and his fellow man-whore to hang out and make shitty old fart rock together instead of separately.

After a hard’s day work on the campaign trail, there’s probably nothing better for Mitt to unwind and rock out to Love Grenade (NSFW) for his listening pleasure.  I’m sure Mrs. Romney gets her own kind of pleasure from Mitt after listening to the Nuge.

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Posted by on April 18, 2012 in Music. Movies. Media. More., News & Views

 

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Why U Wanna Treat Him So Bad?

15 Apr

"Have you heard the word of God and the greatness of hair relaxer today?"

When asked to respond to allegations made in an unauthorized biography, the iconic Marlon Brando shrugged, “Friends don’t write books. Acquaintances do.”

For the 2011 book, Prince: Inside the Music and the Masks, author Ronin Ro (no, I don’t believe that’s his real name either), had to rely upon speaking with managers, musicians, record company executives and others banished from the Purple One’s private universe. As the Artist Who Rarely Speaks to the Press often forbids reporters from recording his few interviews or taking notes , there was no way Prince himself would consent to speak to Ro and does it shows.

Prince is one of the few artists whose output is deserving of the 356 pages Ro devotes to him, but the book is short on any new insights for anyone not already familiar with many of the stories and there is considerably less attention devoted to the music than the miniature musician’s contentious relationship with Warner Brothers. The battle lines are drawn from the beginning as Prince rejects his label’s insistence his debut album, For You be produced by Maurice White, leader of Earth, Wind and Fire.

From that point on, Ro’s storytelling becomes a loop of tales of Prince’s irrational wish to release as much music as he wants to whenever he wants and Warner Brother’s fears of glutting the market with increasingly inferior records to the multimillion selling Purple Rain. The war between art and commerce is an old one and Ro decidedly comes down on the side of commerce as he focuses on how each subsequent post-Purple Rain release from Around the World in A Day performed worse than its predecessor until 1991′s Diamonds and Pearls broke the losing streak.

Ro does well in shining a light on former band members such as guitarist Dez Dickerson, bassist Mark Brown, and the closest thing Prince ever had to actual collaborators Wendy Melovin and Lisa Coleman, but even then he bungles the personal aspects. At one point an angry Prince tells the two who were in a lesbian relationship they would both burn in hell and then the matter is never mentioned again. It’s interesting to learn “Kiss” was given to Brown’s band, Mazarati, but after changing his mind, Prince takes the song back for himself telling Brown, “this song’s too good for you guys” but does Brown resent his former boss’s selfishness? Who knows? Ro never bothers to tell us.

Prince’s personal relationships with Sheila E., Susannah Melovin, actress Kim Basinger, and marriage to Mayte Garcia are mentioned, briefly commented upon and tossed aside.  We are told his supposed rivalry with Michael Jackson was exaggerated, but the only revelation comes that Prince kicked the King of Pop’s ass in table tennis and he decided against doing  a duet on Jackson’s “Bad” because he found the “your butt is mine” lyric ridiculous.

What Ro is most interested in is making the case that while undeniably talented and a creative genius, what Prince lacks in height he makes up for by being a total douche bag. The overall impression given is Prince is cold and indifferent to almost everyone he’s ever come in contact with and is one of the most egotistical, arrogant creeps ever.

Inside the Music and the Masks is full of sloppy writing and missed opportunities.  Ro repeats a claim that a fanzine paid Prince not to get involved in assembling The Hits/B-Sides box set, but just throws that tantalizing line out there unable or uninterested in verifying it. During the height of his battle with Warner Brothers, Prince changes his name to an unpronounceable glyph figuring out if “Prince” is no longer making music, he can escape his contract and the five albums he still owed the label. How this strategy could work doesn’t concern Ro. It only furthers his case Prince is a nut hellbent on fucking up his career.

Ro has a bad habit of climbing into Prince’s head to overhear conversations he wasn’t present for. At one point when an unnamed journalist (Ro couldn’t find out who?) began referring to the petulant pop star as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, Ro writes, It seemingly ridiculed his decision but American newspaper writers used it too. So did TV stations. He frowned, “I’m not The Artist Known As Anything. Use my name.”

How does Ro know Prince was frowning? Who was he directing his complaint to? An employee? A friend? His reflection in the mirror? Like I said: sloppy writing and this unauthorized book is full of unattributed remarks just like that.

Musically, Prince is far removed from his purple prime.  Though portions of 2004′s Musicology and the follow-up 3121 have their bright moments, they are unessential for anyone but the die-hard fan. As a free agent roaming from label to label, Prince has become the equivalent of the journeyman player in the NBA who will always find work as long as he can occasionally knock down a shot. He makes still makes Prince albums but you get the feeling he makes them for no one but himself and that suits him just fine. Where he is his in his element is onstage where a live Prince show is still a hot ticket when he goes on tour and as his 2007 Super Bowl performance demonstrates he can play some bad-ass guitar even in high-heels and the rain.

It isn’t necessary for an author to like his subject and Ro clearly feels Prince’s ego prematurely sabotaged his career. I don’t disagree. The 53-year-old with the ageless features is a far cry from the guy I once argued had failures more interesting than others’ success. He exhausted even my patience with ego trips like the lumbering three-CD, three-hour Emancipation.

Prince deserves much of the criticism he receives, but he also deserves a better critique of his music than this.  In 2002, Prince took offense at former recording engineer Susan Rogers for implying she possessed special insights into his music.  “Susan Rogers, for the record, doesn’t know anything about my music.  Not one thing.  The only person who knows anything about my music is me.”

That could have served as the best critique of Ro’s sketchy accounts and lack of attention to detail.  There is a good book to be written about Prince by someone who can bring an even-handed approach to the topic but this is not hat book and Ro is not that writer.

Brando was right. Friends don’t write books, but acquaintances do and so will enemies.

"Yeah, you wish you could grow your hair like this!"

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Posted by on April 15, 2012 in Music. Movies. Media. More.

 

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